Impeachment or death

the rhetorical configuration of a polemic event in the digital public space

Abstract

This article aims to analyze how the polemic event is set up around some manifestations regarding the polemic act triggered by the congressman Marcelo Freixo (PSOL), when tweeting “Impeachment or death” on Twitter. The analysis will be done in dialogue with Paveau (2013) about digital discourse, with the rhetorical-argumentative studies of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (2005), and with the rhetorical studies on the polemic undertaken by Angenot (2008, 2015), Nascimento (2018a) and Seixas (2019), in order to outline a methodology for understanding the meanings of the polemic in what can be called digital public space. At the end, we observe how the divergent meanings are established around the aforementioned polemic act, which becomes a protest hashtag and an argumentative strategy for the construction of the event.